Google Creative Lab partners with publisher Visual Editions to offer immersive and interactive books designed specifically for smartphones
Brendan Klinkenberg / BuzzFeed :
Context & Ripple Effects
Google Creative Lab has been pushing the phone itself as a creative medium — the same lab behind the Project Tango reference phone opened up to developers in 2015 — and it is now applying that instinct to publishing through a partnership with Visual Editions, a publisher already known for experimental formats. The bet: books written for the touchscreen, not scanned onto it.
The timing matters because Google's reading surface was about to get more capable anyway; months later Play Books shipped Bubble Zoom, which uses machine learning to expand comic-book speech bubbles on Marvel and DC volumes. The Creative Lab deal reads as the design-led front end of a broader push into screen-native reading.
First-order effects
- Visual Editions gains distribution muscle and engineering support from Google, letting it publish titles that only work as smartphone apps rather than static e-books.
- Readers on Android get a new category of interactive, immersive books inside Google's ecosystem, distinct from the standard Play Books catalog.
Second-order effects
- Google Play Books' own feature roadmap follows the same logic — Bubble Zoom's machine-learning treatment of comics shows the platform investing in formats native to each genre's screen experience.
- Rival platforms face pressure to answer with their own non-traditional formats; Amazon's later Kindle Vella novella app sits in exactly that slot, per the related coverage of publishers courting young readers.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the book splits into device-native genres — app-books, enhanced comics, serialized novellas, AI-narrated audio — with platform owners like Google and Amazon acting as gatekeepers of which formats reach readers, as the 2021 roundup of publisher tech experiments illustrates.
The trend: Book publishing is shifting from digitized print toward device-native formats designed by platform companies, with Google and Amazon competing to define what a 'book' looks like on a phone.